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patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they
will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with
the system at a higher level of discourse. I do not know. But I believe it may
work out that way.
In an October 1968 appendix to the same essay, Pask (1971, 98) recorded
that this prediction concerning human involvement had proved to be “quite
accurate, though entrainment is not nearly so effective with even moderate
ambient illumination level.” In other words, interaction with the Colloquy
was best achieved in the dark. According to John Frazer (personal com-
munication, 30 September 2004), people used womens' makeup mirrors to
redirect the robots' light beams. One visitor to the exhibition recalled, “Some
of the visitors stayed for several hours conversing with the mobiles” (Zeidner
et al. 2001, 984).
What can we say about the Colloquy as ontological theater? Evidently it was in
the same space as Musicolour, staging open-ended performative encounters
between its participants, now multiple concurrent dances of agency among
the five robots. In this instance, however, the participants in these dances were
all machines, putting the Colloquy in the same space as the mirror and mating
dances of Walter's tortoises and Ashby's multihomeostat setups. Like Walter
and Ashby's machines, the Colloquy did not evolve in a fully open-ended
fashion—the robots had a finite range of behaviors and fixed goals—but the
introduction of human participants modified the picture, making possible
a more fully open-ended range of possible performances by the human-
Colloquy assemblage. As Pask noted in above quotation, the humans could
engage with the robots at “a higher level of discourse,” finding their own goals
for the behavior of the system, just like a Musicolour performer but in coop-
eration with a different opto-electro-mechanical setup. It is also worth noting
that the Colloquy foregrounded the role of language, communication, and
signaling more sharply than the tortoise or the homeostat. One can indeed
speak of signaling in connection with the tortoises, say: they responded to the
presence or absence of light, and also to thresholds in light intensity. But the
combination of different lights and sounds in the Colloquy (and the limited
possibilities for robotic movement) brought this signaling aspect to the fore.
Once more, then, we can say that the Colloquy was a piece of epistemological
as well as ontological theater, and again I want to note that its epistemological
aspects were geared straight into the ontological ones. The various modes of
